When a person is diagnosed with a chronic illness, their life changes overnight. All of a sudden they must learn how to manage their medical condition and learn how to adapt their lifestyle. When a child is diagnosed with a chronic illness, the difficulty is compounded even more. The child often does not have the maturity level that is necessary to effectively process the feelings of isolation and fear. It creates difficulty not only for the child, but also for the child's parents and doctors.
For children, a diagnosis of illness can be scary and isolating, and for their parents, a diagnosis can be overwhelming Often times children have a hard time conceptualizing illness. They may also feel isolated since their peers cannot directly relate to their experience with illness. Parents are entrusted by doctors to not only care for their child's illness, but also to educate their children about how to manage their disease. For parents, it can be difficult and stressful to transfer complex disease care information to their children. Similarly, doctors have difficulty explaining illness to children and helping to comfort them during diagnosis and follow up visits. When a child is diagnosed with an illness, they often need an immense amount of education and training to become proficient in self-management.
Conventional methods of education require one-on-one counseling with a doctor or nurse educator and occur in short sessions. It is not cost effective to provide the longer term support that families often need to become proficient in disease care. Moreover, conventional methods of disease-related education are geared towards parents and caregivers, relying on parents to pass relevant information on to children and furthering the child's feelings of isolation.
Accordingly, a need remains for improved methods and systems for assisting children who have been diagnosed with a disease. Embodiments of the inventive concept address these and other limitations in the prior art.
The foregoing and other features of the inventive concept will become more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.